Gaia Community: Venita's Blog

humming....

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:32:21 -0000

    Following is an entry I wrote for on on-line book discussion on Wilber’s The Eye of Spirit before most integral communities came into being. This was with a group from the Haven Institute in Canada. I mention Jock below.  Jock McKeen and Ben Wong are two of my favorite teachers. I was blessed to learn so much from them about the body, energy, emotion and boundaries.

Date: Saturday, January 26, 2002 8:50 AM Subject: [haven-discuss] Wilber- Chapter 9

Dear friends,

On page 206 in The Eye of Spirit, Wilber states:

"..we are constantly contracting away from infinity into forms of grasping and experiencing and knowing and willing. ....At the beginning of this and every moment, each individual is God as the Clear Light; but by the end of this same moment--in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye--he winds up as an isolated ego. And what happens In Beween the beginning and ending of this moment is identical to what happened In Between death and rebirth as described by the Tibetan Book of the Dead."

I have not read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but I have meant to and I need to attempt it, I think. Earlier in the paragraph, Wilber refers back to the idea of involution and evolution, stating that the process doesn't just happen during each lifetime, but it also happens in each moment. I find this very exciting. Within each moment, each twinkling of an eye, I contract into venita and then dissolve into god or Emptiness, over and over and over again?!

I am not a scientist, but this idea makes me think of Jock talking about atoms...how each atom is mostly empty space and therefore we are comprised of mostly empty space. I also think about Sephen Hawkings Brief History of Time in which he talks about black holes(?) and howthey are really full of particles of Light! These ideas for me validate my ability to experience myself as now emptiness and now form...the beginning of a vague sense of non-dual experience. And I imagine that as awareness is more refined, the experience of contracting and expanding will speed up. Until an occasional glimpse of the contracting and expanding becomes a pulsation experience. Until the pulsation experience becomes a Vibrational experience. Until the Vibration experience is just Hum.

Magic Demons

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:08:14 -0000

Photo taken in Tijuana, Mexico December 2007

Let your mind drop into the Heart.
Where Love Reigns Supreme
Like Magic Demons
Streaming rainbow swirls of vibrant venomous laughter
infecting every creature
with the Light of soulful comeuppance

Hideous and quietly tiptoeing
through tulips bobbing into infinite blue
wandering joyously while crying tears
for the amazing sacred holy grace that forever languishes
dying forever into infinite release,

Then reforming into this, another act of love.

***

Tantra, Human Revelation/Shadow, and Passion

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:21:00 -0000

Photo by Madeleine Lewis

(Entry reposted from May 06 Integral New York City salon discussion list)

There is something so ripe and deep and beautiful in the revelation of our stories. Open conversation brings human confusion and denial from shadow to light..from the unconscious to the conscious, from the unspoken to the spoken, from the secret to the revealed. Imagine everyone bringing their previous difficult experiences into the open and discussing them ...with responsibility and deep self-reflection...albeit with questions that remain. Imagine how much more i/we could learn from the tales and insights of others with this kind of strength, depth, openness to learning and self-honesty.

This morning i immersed myself in a book called Yoga Spandakarika by Daniel Odier. He is a scholar with a gift of presenting very simply an integration of the texts of Ch'an, Dzogchen, and the Chinese, Tibetan and Kashmiri Mahamudras. He says:

"The great subtlety of the Tantric masters was to take the whole of human passions and to ask themselves these questions: "How to make it so that all is used, nothing is denied, nothing is rejected? How to make it so that we will not find ourselves one day face to face with our own demons, who always come back in hordes to destroy the quest? .....The Tantric approach..is to engage ourselves completely with our human characteristics and to accept the whole of what we are. ....Once we start to understand this dynamic, we realize that there really is no place for sublimation. There is simply the act of looking deeply at what is there and of allowing whatever has remained buried to come up out of the ground and open like a budding flower."

He then goes on to say that as we look at every desire, thought, feeling experience that arises we realize that it isn't a specific desire or passion that brings suffering...but a limitation of that desire or passion (i.e. contracting around it in any way). Instead, if we completely open to it and accept it, we liberate ourselves and everything into the infinite space of the "heart" or supreme consciousness. "Once passion is freed from suffering [contraction around an object], it becomes even more intense....there is now an impassioned energy that continually quenches our thirst. ...this spherical kundalini, which unfurls from the heart and permeates the totality of space, is quite simply absolute love. ...Absolute love is neurotic love ...whose limits have quite simply exploded and evaporated:"

Addendum 10/2007

And simultaneously, expansion and contraction are One, like the yin/yang symbol. One cannot exist without the other. Contraction is embraced/dissolved in the expansion and expansion is embraced/dissolved into contraction. The dance happens.

Letting Go and Letting Come: The Bottom of the U

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 04:36:24 -0000

"Willing to die, you give up your will:
Keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move."
Wendell Berry

This is still one of my favorite contemplations and guiding principles.

Once i completely let go....all the way....let go of wanting an answer, a direction, or anything at all....once i am willing to die into this moment...completely and truly die even into great fear, then there is complete stillness. There is nothing. Sometimes there is nothing for what seems like a long time.

But you stay in this nothing space. You just stay and stay and stay and eventually there is an inkling or a desire to stir. Eventually the stillness wants to die too, and from way down deep...from somewhere prior to your existence and beyond it, some inkling enters your awareness. Movement wants to happen, wants to emerge, be born. At that point don't grasp, just be curious. Stay still. Wait. The inkling may die back out and if so let it. It may stay small or it may grow on its own. The energy of it may not leave you alone. It might start tugging on your sleeve or pulling at your shirt or kick you in the ass or rise right up out of you and through you, so powerfully that it disrupts your entire life. It might be a small but constant trickle. Pay attention and follow/respond. If it dies out remain still. If it doesn't leave you alone, then listen. Follow. Pretty soon you find that you are completely animated by This. It moves You. This is one way to know who you are.

Global Connections for a Possible Future - Now

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 05:00:51 -0000

Well, I'm back. I am a different person than i was. Aren't we always.....it's just that we don't realize the changes that accrue incrementally and subtly until a huge iceburg breaks away all at once and we find ourselves afloat in some new territory..... and then new reflections show us our new self piece by piece, one side or one angle at a time until we get a big enough picture of who we are now and where we are now landed. At least for this snapshot in time. This moment. Because the change never stops, really. It's just that we want to cling to form and the known past out of some need for illusory security. And then we become rigidified and frozen, unhappy, stale, depressed and empty.

So, humm. Maybe it works better just to keep oneself in motion, present to the ongoing emergent possibilities... the everpresent collaboration with all that exists, that keeps us on our toes, always one with and privy to the unknowable, never sure, but always awake.

I had the priviledge of meeting George Por and Helen Titchen Beeth in Brussels in June. I met many others as well, in an Art of Hosting workshop in the Belgian countryside. I travelled to Rotterdam to see my friend Anita Floris whom I met in Salt Lake City last October while at The Big Mind retreat and i spent a couple of hours in The Hague with Peter Merry, learning about his Center for Human Emergence.

These are remarkable people who are making a difference, people who are infiltrating the mainstream with Boddhisattvic innovation. Our meetings with each other strengthen the Field that can make possible the best of the Human heart, mind, spirit and future. Through our work in our communities and our meetings with one another, we can make a difference.

Ideas like the Collective Buddha, Evolutionary Nexus, Collective Intelligence, and communties like the Berkana Institute, Integral, Better World Network, Pacific Integral and others are on the verge of coming together. We are creating a huge web out of thin air, an infrastructure to link the human family in compassionate and hopeful embrace. It is a big piece of work and we welcome all who are called to join.

The Indestructible Drop

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:19:03 -0000

photo by George Jisho Robertson

According to Tibetan Buddhism/book of the dead..... The Indestructible drop resides in the center of the chest. It is like a drop of nectar that is the seed of your soul and it migrates from lifetime to lifetime and is connected to the All. When one drops into this "drop" of nectar, this place through which the eternal stream asserts itself, words become like honey, sweet, easy and fluid. Paradox finds its Union in this Beloved Temple called Home. Love, Life and Light reside Here and no where.

In this "surrender" is where we "rest" in the knowledge and experience that there is no control and no self. Only the Mercy of the Universe, shining through "our" Wondering, "our" Being and "our" Doing.

On page 180 of The Eye of Spirit, Wilber explains the Tibetan Buddhist model as follows:

"In the heart center of every human, there is an empty essence of consciousness, divided into two layers or drops: 1) the "lifetime indestructible drop," which develops during a particular lifetime, but perishes upon bilogical death, and 2), within or interior to the lifetime indestructible drop, the "eternal indestructible drop," which lasts until Buddhahood and thus transmigrates from life to life until radical Enlightenment."

He continues: "In general....the higher level of stable evolution reached in any given life permeates the eternal indestructible drop and thus is carried, not usually as specific memories but as a mood of adaptation, to the next life. .....the more evolved the soul is, the less involved it is (i.e., the less it forgets its higher source and suchness), and this continues until radical Enlightenment, whereupon the soul is completely subsumed or superseded in prior Unborn Spirit or radical Emptiness, which is simply the luminous transparency of this and every moment."

Big Mind Training with Genpo Roshi

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:18:01 -0000

Even Formlessness is formless
And Emptiness is empty
And Big mind has no substance
And love is just an illusion

Yet Here I Am

Writing these words
With no self at the helmless helm
And self holding the pen that is no pen
Smiling at the beauty that doesn't exist
And loving without loving

Now
This body moves
as it moves
No one else like this
Formlessness defined through each thought, word and deed
Every movement ordinary.
Every movement divine.

And Tantra - Splashing in the Ecstatic Miracle of the Human Heart

One of 10 million relics in this sea of beauty and death, i sparkle as only i can. Unscathed in spirit and demolished in bone, I walk out of the immersion, onto the shores of this imaginary dream to offer the fruits of my human remains before i am gone again.

My Beloved. Your Beauty and Grace astound me. I bow to your Greatness. I bathe in your Glory. I fall to the ground and kiss the earth upon which you walk. I stand tall into the heavens, arms wide open, raised to the sky, rejoicing in your everpresent existence.

Skilfull Means

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 02:07:13 -0000

There is a way to be with another that goes deeper than hearing with the ears and seeing with the eyes. There is the listening with the ears and the seeing through the eyes, yes. But there is also a possibility of feeling into ones own cells. Breathing awareness into and through one's own entire physical and subtle body/mind/emotion/energy field. And through that openness, the "other" can be sensed or felt, especially if that "other" is also open. Then there is a feeling of what it is like to be that person. How it feels to be and walk in the world as that person. Where the physical holding is in the musculature of the other, how that holding shifts the skeletal structure, how the holding stops the breath from circulating to expand, contract and take up space. How all of this holding stops various emotions or freedom of expression and how these various blockages lead to a cluster of psychological processes (including chakra imbalances) and behavioral interactions that interfere with relationships and life effectiveness in general.

In being with someone like this (with their permission), it is then possible to begin reflecting awareness back to help this person see the contractions as well as the amazing qualities of who they are. How relaxing the contractions, actually liberates the self system to allow for greater versatility and fullness.

With practice, another learns how to empty the mind and breathe awareness down into the body, drop into the body and sense or feel their own cellular body/emotion/mind/energy so their own awareness can be brought to their own holdings and released consciously as they wish. They are able to feel/receive much subtler communication, achieve greater responsivness, greater aliveness and connection within themselves, to others and to Life.

In being with another where they are, it is possible to walk together into releasing the blockages that prevent their most potent, authentic and exuberant expression of this precious human body that only they inhabit. And if they are open, it is an honor to open together and to surrender to immersion in the most Brilliant One that we share.

Loosening Structures

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 05:11:11 -0000

The loosening and dismantling continues. As i keep giving up being right, possessing, being attached to what i think i want i just keep feeling stunned. I spent last year dissolving and feeling stunned. This year i am still stunned but i had been struck with Light and stunned by bliss....until now.   Now the bliss is dissipating. And i am beginning to see that not only am i the Light shining through all things. But i am the different selves, taking all of the different perspectives of those individual selves.

As i loosen my self sense, my structure of who i believe myself to be, i have a vague sense of myself as loosely being/becoming/ shifting in and out of all of the many forms. In this sense, i can change, shift, inhabit the many different aspects of existence.   I loosely become them and as if in a dreamy state i am beginning to see that in a sense i am them.

And i don't feel "out of my body" in this.  From an experiential pov, i have more of a sense of embodiment than i ever have before. Now instead of feeling myself incarnated in one distinct form, i have a sense of the notion of shifting into and out of many different forms or selves.

I can't really say that this feels good. It is disconcerting and yet i am really curious about it. There's really no place to land, and the ego becomes like a house of cards....empty of anything substantial.   How is this useful?   It allows me greater compassion, understanding, freedom, flexibility, insight, openness to learning for starters. Likely this will lead to a greater capacity for love, wisdom and skilful communication.

Next week on October 4th, i go to another Pacific Integral GTC seminar. The last two have opened me in dramatic ways. It's likely this one will, too. Two weeks after i return, i go to Salt Lake City for 4 weeks to train in the Big Mind process with Genpo Roshi and Diane Hamilton. There will be much practice in inhabiting many different selves, seeing that they are all constructs and opening to greater freedom.

And there will be much that is yet unknown. The more open and loose in structure i can be, the more i will take in and the more expansion that will take place. That is my practice.....to stay loose and become as much of it as possible while maintaining the integrity that is mine to carry.

Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:07:55 -0000

Ten Oxherding Pictures

10. Entering The Market Place With Helping Hands

Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful.
I use no magic to extend my life;
Now, before me, the dead trees become alive.

The final picture shows a ragged, pot-bellied man walking barefoot bearing a sack full of goodies. This last stage represents freedom, wisdom and compassion. We are not encumbered by appearances. We adapt freely to high and low places. We find spirituality everywhere, it is not confined to monasteries and secluded places. Meditation and realization do not make us passive but active. We are deeply connected to the world, we feel its suffering and we want to respond and help. Our bag is full of joy, compassion, understanding, loving-kindness, wisdom and skilful means.

We naturally give to ourselves and others what is beneficial. We listen deeply, we observe unobtrusively and respond appropriately. When we give we do not expect anything. We are not superior to others when we help them, on the contrary helping them is like helping ourselves and we are grateful they give us that opportunity to extend ourselves. When we love it is with total acceptance. We do not help only people we like but also people who are difficult. However, we do not force our ideas-our opinions, what works for us-on others. We try to bring lightness into people's lives. We do not take it all too seriously.

When we look at the Ten Oxherding Pictures we have to be careful not to think that self-development and Zen practice go in a strait line. It is more like a spiral. We go round and up, hopefully. We go back to different stages but with more understanding. We deepen our realization of each stage as we continue on the path. We still have delusions and attachments to shed. We discover more ways to develop concentration and enquiry further. Master Kusan had three different major awakenings, and each time he continued to practise even more. The last time, his own teacher, Master Hyobong, said: 'Until now you have been following me; now it is I who should follow you.'

enlightenment - one description

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:02:44 -0000

I found this on Yeshe's website http://www.iyeshe.com . Thank you for finding this, Helen. I am reposting it here.

This bijou exerpt from "Enlightenment reframed", by Walter Truett Anderson in Psychotherapy Networker describes the difference between "flow experiences" and elightenment experiences:

"In flow experiences, the concept of self slips below the threshold of awareness, but the person is usually unconscious of this change. What happens in enlightenment experiences is that the person knows that the "I" that we normally take to be the experiencer isn't present. There's an awareness that things are happening, but without an awareness that they're happening to anyone in particular or because of any individual's volition."

And then, in the very next paragraph, no less, he goes on to explain enlightenment in a most enlightening fashion:

"This restructuring of consciousness is the core of enlightenment. It can explode into the mind in one blinding flash of insight, or it can arrive in gentler installments that become the framework for an ongoing re-visioning of everything in life. This mental shift is the source of all the other perceptual, emotional, and cognitive phenomena that are commonly found in the enlightenment complex: the immersion in the present, the lessening of attachment, the palpable presence of love--love without a lover or even a loved one--the sharpening of sensory perceptions, the sense of amazement at the ordinary, and the discovery that everyday, I-centered cognition is only one way to organize experience."

Cosmic Conscience

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 22:09:37 -0000

Cosmic Conscience

As we reach for higher and higher levels of human potential, a completely new kind of moral development enters into the picture, which is what I call "cosmic conscience." Cosmic conscience is what emerges when the individual awakens to the evolutionary impulse or Authentic Self, and begins to see his or her own capacity for self-awareness as part of a fourteen-billion-year process of development. When you contemplate this nothing-less-than-cosmic context for your very own life, and begin to understand that your own experience of awareness is literally the cutting edge of that vast unfolding process, you realize that the continuation of that process is now completely dependent upon your own willingness to consciously create the future. Awakening to this overwhelming fact puts more pressure on the individual self-sense than anything else ever could. In the face of this ultimate responsibility, either you're going to go crazy or you will very quickly become profoundly sane-because you have no choice, because it's your obligation to do so, because the future is totally dependent upon you. That is cosmic conscience: the realization that "It's up to me."

The degree to which you awaken to this cosmic conscience is the degree to which you will actually find the wherewithal to handle your own personal experience, however overwhelming it may be, because you realize that who you really are and what you're here for is far greater than any of your personal concerns. That alone is what makes it possible to abandon all unwholesome expressions of self and embrace the ultimately empowering and ennobling qualities of natural dignity, humility, and self-respect that this cosmic conscience potentially engenders in the human heart and soul.

Andrew Cohen

kissed by the sun..

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 05:36:14 -0000

In the state of Washington we have a beautiful 14,000 foot mountain called Mount Ranier. Over the last couple of days a few integral friends met at a log cabin on the slopes of one of the peaks near Ranier and we spent Saturday hiking in the mountain among fields of purple and white daisies and bright magenta indian paint brush, lakes, streams and the freshest air i've smelled in some time.

The sun was warm on my skin. The air was clean and fragrant with wild flower blossoms, evergreen and snow. The eye could see forested peaks all around and behind a deep valley that held a pristine lake. Blue sky opened up forever with billowy clouds. These mountains had existed for thousands of years. I found myself aware of the beauty all around and then in awe of my own awareness. For moments i became aware of my awareness and aware that i was aware of Awareness. And for seconds i knew that That Awareness existed before i was born and will continue after this body dies.

And i remembered what a miracle it was for me to be standing there at all...gazing upon and absorbing this stunning, magnificence. Me and the mountain, the flowers, the sun, the sky, the lake, the hills, the trees, the clouds, the air.....drinking each other in, shimmering as parts of the many and emanating from the Same One that creates, sustains and destroys. All of us there, gazing upon one another in wonder.

Then the young agile teenage girls would scamper past, almost flying, rubbery limbs in all directions, expressing the joy and energy that sparkles and delights...and little dogs, that same joyful, unbounded playfulness. What fun to be alive.

Poetry by Hafiz

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 15:55:52 -0000

Dropping Keys

the small man
builds cages for everyone
he
knows.
While the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.

With That Moon Language

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still, though,
think about this,
this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?

Dropping into the Heart of all Being

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 15:51:13 -0000

Goddess on a Piano Bench - Painting by Mary Veronica Sweeney

After everything is completely deconstructed and left in pieces on the floor.... After every single thing that can be witnessed, the body and all physical manifestations, the mind and its belief systems, the imagination...everything.... After all of this is dropped what is left?

Everything that can be witnessed is temporary, fleeting, illusory in a way, constructed. But there is one thing that is everpresent, non-changing, always already here, right now. That is pure formless Consciousness, the Simple Feeling of Being.

When i let go of grasping and avoiding and i rest into this Consciousness... and i drop into my heart and allow my human heart to dissolve into this Consciousness, to open ever wider, deeper and higher, what i experience is Satchitananda, Truth, Being and Bliss. The self and the Self are not two. I am the One and the many and venita all simultaneously arising from the heart of my being that is merged with the Heart of all Being. My heart opens ever wider and i experience a delicious and sweet reward of a beautiful light-filled expanse that includes all human joy and human suffering, indeed the experience of all sentient and non-sentient beings, pulsating from birth to death and back again, in this and every blink, breath and heartbeat.

i am that

Higher, Deeper, Broader

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:34:58 -0000

The deeper you're willing to go within and the greater your ability to let go...to experience any terrible, frightening, horrendous thing or fantasy with an openness to all of the terror and pain that reside within - the greater the capacity to experience your own ecstatic joy. And when your achievement is such that you have overcome every dark night demon that obstucts your ascent into Heaven, and you've reached that height of joy and bliss and ecstatic union...then once more be willing to Throw Your Self Off and let go of That. Then you will broaden your capacity for All of It.

Consciousness reaches into infinity in every direction and it is directionless. Thus be willing to go deeper, higher and broader in scope by letting go completely into each and every particle of wakefulness that enters. Let go of resisting pain. Let go of resisting pleasure. Let go of hell. Let go of heaven and bliss.

Just GO.

Higher, Deeper, Broader.

Painting by Mary Veronica Sweeney

(Lyrics below by Bird York)

Thought you had
all the answers to
rest your heart upon....

Then something happens
don't see it coming and
you can't stop yourself...

Now you're out there swimmin
in the Dee-ee-ee-ee-eep

Life keeps tumblin' your
heart in circles 'til you... let go
Til you Shed your pride and you
Climb to Heaven
and you Throw Yourself OFF

And now you're out there swimmin' in the Dee-ee-ee-ee-eep

http://www.birdyork.com/media/bird-perfvideo.mov

The Mechanics of my Undoing

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 20:49:44 -0000

They say before you dismantle the structure, you have to have one.

In order to have one, you have to enter it in every way imaginable, get to know it, shine light into the shadows; as a friend says, cry it out, scream it out, shout it out, wait it out, feel it, love it, be it, know it, and mostly just realize that there is nothing to fear in the pain of being human. Walk into the fire fearlessly. Inhabit the sensations within, the emotion, the trauma, this vestibule.

Until there is virtually nothing to hide from others because you have not hidden it from yourself and you know that these human traits are possessed by every man and every woman.

Becoming more and more transparent, with much of the fear faced and the attachment to (or fear of) the pain burned up i feel vibration and tingling sensation in my body almost constantly, now. But until recently, a belief system had remained, a sense of a physical structure that is concrete, an ego that wants to get somewhere, a personality that has been "successful" at life, a heart that is afraid to drop completely into The Heart and Love "what is" fully.

And then come a series of events...many endings and changes, a willingness to dissolve into the unknown over many months, a job ending, an auto accident, teachers who gently show, soothe and shine. An Other who beckons into Heart Space. And the body mind is dropped.

The brilliant golden light that has been seen as "outside" is allowed to enter the chest cavity and inhabit the body, blinding every cell and normal sight. In one sense all that can be seen is light. In another every normal thing is seen but is changed, somehow..as if what used to be foreground becomes figment.

A Thou enters into We-space...a person who has been practicing and playing and delving into these realms..a person strong enough and brave enought and bold enough to say, "let's open our hearts together." And i pull apart the ribs and skin that cover my heart and that golden light begins to emanate from deep in the center of my chest, still filling me and blinding me and now emerging, not able to be contained in this body...the structure beginning to give way.

And then the teachers appear.
YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, they say.  Allow yourself to shine out your Beauty.  TAKE OFF THE STRUCTURES THAT BIND. And so the belief system that resides in the brain and bodymind is taken apart, dismantled, left in pieces on the floor, unnecessary.

The ego with its desire to achieve and prove and be somebody is questioned and pointed out as a construct, seen as a way to measure others and the self by ones standards which ultimately are empty (and not).

The personality is simultaneously celebrated and seen as loose, fluid, challenged to release itself into billions of perspectives and embodiments. This personality is just a tool kit. "Own it" he says. "Don't let it own you."

Now finding my way through This. Stepping lightly, unsure. Yet more defenseless than i've ever been.